We’re going to wrap up our coverage of a senate panel questioning representatives of Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Here’s what we learned:

9.00pm GMT

The tech reps are done. There’s a second panel featuring Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and terrorism analyst Michael S Smith.

8.58pm GMT

Kennedy is back.

He asks Stretch if FB can generate lists of teenagers who think they’re overweight.

8.53pm GMT

Franken challenges Salgado and they kind of talk past each other.

Franken turns again to Stretch. He asks about ad targeting for the topic “jew hater” on FB. FB has removed the topic from the ad platform. But how could such categories be generated and allowed to exist.

8.50pm GMT

Franken’s back. Can Twitter and Google vow not to take foreign political ads paid for with foreign money?

Twitter’s Edgett: Sure.

8.46pm GMT

Graham: Are any of you in the content business?

Stretch: The vast vast majority of content on the platform is user-generated.

8.40pm GMT

8.39pm GMT

Senator Hirono: Can you say that content on your platform did not have some kind of effect on the election?

Stretch: “We’re not well positioned to judge why any one person or an entire electorate voted as it did.”

Response to Sen Kennedy here on Twitter suggests just how much bipartisan voter support could be found in dragging tech cos

7.53pm GMT

Senator Klobuchar asks for support for an ad transparency bill… which she doesn’t quite get.

None of the representatives will commit definitively to supporting the Klobuchar/Warner/McCain legislation to increase ad transparency.

7.51pm GMT

Then Kennedy asks Google if they’re a tech platform or a media company. That’s an easy one. Tech platform, says Salgado. But Kennedy, who is on fire, asks Salgado if Google delivers news (and makes decisions about what news people see?) – isn’t that what a newspaper does? Salgado insists that Google is not a media company.

7.49pm GMT

Kennedy further challenges Stretch on what FB knows about the average user. Stretch insists the company is blind to certain details.

Kennedy on FB targeting: “Say I want to know everything about Sen. Graham; the bars he goes to…” (“ooooohs” in hearing room)

7.44pm GMT

Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, says he’s proud these companies are American but “your power sometimes scares me.”

Then he lights this sleeping hearing up.

7.36pm GMT

Here’s senator Dick Durbin. He tells Stretch anti-bias organization have raised the alarm about Russia-backed pages spreading bigoted messages. He accuses Facebook of providing consultant help to an “anti-Muslim effort.”

Stretch says the content they’ve turned over “is vile, and it’s vile for precisely the reason you say. It’s particularly exploitative…. [of] groups that have every reason to expect us to protect the authenticity of the debate on FB… we are reviewing and tightening our ad policies.”

7.34pm GMT

Facebook’s Stretch says they have 10,000 people working on safety and security and they’ll double that number by 2018.

7.32pm GMT

Edgett on how Twitter polices content: “We have a very respected trust and safety team.”

Edgett thanks Feinstein for asking him what an “impression” on Twitter is. “So we’re all on the same page,” he says.

7.26pm GMT

it’s important to again note that of the three tech companies –Facebook, Google or Twitter– none of them sent their CEOs to testify today.

And none of them seem to be feeling much pressure, either.

7.25pm GMT

Salgado is asked why RT was allowed to participate in a preferred status ads program and he simply blames “algorithms”.

7.25pm GMT

Feinstein asks about Facebook’s custom audiences tool. Can FB explain who was targeted with the tool?Stretch says the content is “imitative of social causes” which “is what makes the content to vile, so upsetting so cynical, its attempt to aggravate divisions in our society.”

He describes “broad geographic targeting” – 75% targeted USA as a whole, 25% targeted to states. And “they were targeted to interest groups.”

7.21pm GMT

Stretch says Facebook is working broadly in questions of authenticity on its platform.

What they’ve learned has helped them create new automated tools, he says.

7.18pm GMT

Chuck Grassley cameo. He has a beef with reporting about a Facebook ads targeting Hillary Clinton.

His staff has reviewed the ads.

7.16pm GMT

Edgett of Twitter says it’s a problem to get to know your client. “Who is running an ad, who is paying?” Who are they targeting?

“We’re working on the best approach to getting to know the clients… who are signing up for advertising.”

7.15pm GMT

Whitehouse asks the witnesses what they’re doing to fix it and what success looks like.

Graham sums it up. Russia started interfering in 2015 and continued afterward. During the election they were trying to foment discord, mostly against Clinton. Afterward they attacked the legitimacy of Trump’s election.

Whitehouse: “I take it we can all agree that the Russians did in fact meddle… is that correct?”

“Approximately 90% of the volume we saw on the ad side was issues-based.”

7.08pm GMT

Stretch says FB has been tracking foreign actors since before and after the election.

“Following the election, the activity we’ve seen really continued, in the sense that… this concerted effort to sow division and discord… In the wake.. we saw a lot of activity… fomenting discord about the validity of his election… it continued until we disabled the accounts.”

7.06pm GMT

Edgett, of Twitter, says the accounts come ‘disproportionately’ out of Russia.

7.05pm GMT

Graham starts. Other than Russia, he says, what nations are you concerned about tampering in elections?

Salgado seeks to draw a line between Google and the other two companies:

“Google’s products don’t lend themselves to the kind of targeting or viral dissemination that the attackers seem to prefer.”

7.03pm GMT

Now it’s Richard Salgado, director of law enforcement and infosec at Google.

He used to be at the justice department, focusing on hacking.

6.59pm GMT

Edgett says they’re working “to make sure the experience of 2016 never happens again.” Holler?

6.58pm GMT

Twitter is up next. “We are troubled by reports that the power of Twitter was misused by a foreign actor…” to tamper in the election,

Edgett calls it “a new challenge for us and one that we are determined to meet.”

6.54pm GMT

Being at the forefront of technology also means being at the forefront… of challenges, Stretch says.

He says he wants to talk about the threat of extremist content and efforts of foreign actors to interfere with the 2016 election.

6.50pm GMT

Stretch of Facebook starts talking. He appreciates the hard work of Congress. “We are deeply concerned about all of these threats,” he says.

6.49pm GMT

Senator Feinstein said she had a briefing last week and saw “really for the first time how Russia has harnessed… the frightening-to-me power of social media” including by using “fake accounts” to manipulate opinion.

“How easily and successfully they turned modern technologies to their advantage,” Feinstein says. She says that’s not widely recognized yet.

6.45pm GMT

Whitehouse says “no serious person can dispute” the hacking and theft of information by Russia.

Now Whitehouse jumps in with both feet.

6.39pm GMT

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is up. He uses the phrase “Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election,” which Graham, who recently became a bosom golfing buddy of Trump, did not.

In this blog we’ll consider how Russian tampering on social platforms in the 2016 election was carried out by online imposters and totally missed by the platform hosts. We’ll see how bad the hosts now feel about it all, if they do.

But another pot in the Trump-Russia affair has been simmering this week, with the announcement Monday that a former senior adviser to Trump had pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, with whom he is now cooperating. Trump’s former campaign chairman and a deputy were separately charged.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage as representatives of three American tech giants appear before Congress to explain how and why Russian operatives were given free rein on their networks to tamper with the 2016 presidential election.

Starting at 2.30pm ET, representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter are scheduled to appear before the Senate judiciary committee. Tomorrow the same three companies are to appear before the Senate and House intelligence committees.